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Paving the way for transplant history

Fifty years ago last week, Dr. James Hardy and a surgical team at UMMC performed a first: transplanting a chimpanzee heart into a human - Boyd Rush, a retired upholsterer in Hattiesburg. Though controversial, the operation on Jan. 23, 1964 proved the concept and technology, which led to the world’s first human-to-human transplant on Dec. 3, 1967, in South Africa.